The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (102 page)

“In
clear space,” he concluded, “we could probably limp along for a while. We might
even be able to pick up enough velocity to use the gap drive. But it wouldn’t
do us any good. We don’t have the control to choose a heading we can count on.

“Navigating
this swarm will be like playing pinball.”

Sorus
listened to him as if he weren’t pronouncing a sentence of death.
The
control to choose a heading we can count on.
Gap capability meant nothing
without precise heading and velocity. In other words,
Soar
couldn’t
escape the Massif-5 system. She couldn’t save herself.

To keep
the ship out of human hands, Taverner would order self-destruct. The Amnion
were like that. If Sorus refused, he would release the airborne mutagens which
he’d prepared in the scrubbers. Then everyone aboard would be changed — and his
orders would be carried out.

Yet
Sorus heard nothing but hope in data’s report. Obliquely and unpredictably, her
prayers were still being answered.

“Where
are we?” she asked scan quietly.

The
woman looked up from her board. “Hard to say, Captain. Suddenly our charts are”
— she tried to chuckle — “out-of-date.”

Perhaps
she, too, understood something about hope.

“But at
a guess, we’re here.” She routed a schematic to one of the displays.
Soar
appeared
to be roughly thirty k past the limits of the singularity’s gravity well — a
considerable distance off the departure which dead Lab Centre had assigned to
Trumpet
.
“I can’t speak for helm, but we ought to be able to find our way from here. It
just won’t be as clear as the course Lab Centre gave us.”

Sorus
nodded. “Any sign of
Trumpet
? Any ships at all?”

“Not
that I can see,” scan replied. “As far as I can gauge it,
Free Lunch
was
sitting right at the centre of the singularity. She must have been the first
thing it ate. And
Trumpet
wasn’t as far away as we were. If she
survived, she’s got God on her side. It would take a goddamn miracle.”

Sorus
smiled at the woman. No question about it: the scan first understood something.
Her rueful answering grin told her captain that Sorus wasn’t alone.

One
more answer, that’s all I need, she thought. Just one. Is it too much to ask?

She
took a moment to consider the blips flashing on her board. Most of them warned
her about dangers she already knew; threats she expected. But one came as a
surprise.

Someone
had used an airlock. Specifically the airlock to the cargo bay which had been
breached by debris from the destruction of Thanatos Minor.

Shit!
That was insane. All her people knew better than to leave their g-restraints in
combat. And any sentient being knew better than to enter a breached cargo bay
under these conditions.

Nevertheless
it was unmistakable. Someone had opened the airlock; used it; closed it again.
Without sealing it. According to her status readout, the sealing mechanism was
inoperative.

No. She
didn’t believe it. It was probably just stress damage — too much g, too much
pounding. She’d seen stranger readings that turned out to be false.

And she
didn’t have the time or energy to worry about it. Her scant remaining resources
were needed for prayer —

Shaking
her head, she shifted her attention to Milos Taverner and inquired, “What do
you want us to do?”

He didn’t
glance up at her. He was fixed to his SCRT, feeding and receiving data.
Nevertheless he replied promptly, as if he’d heard everything she’d said. As if
like God he had the power to grant miracles —

“Captain
Chatelaine, analysis of
Trumpet’s
thrust-to-mass ratio during her escape
from Thanatos Minor suggests that her drive is adequate to retrieve her from
the singularity’s event horizon. It is conceivable that she has survived.
Indeed, it seems plausible that she ensured her capacity to survive before she
activated her weapon. That is —”

He
faltered as if he’d come to a translation barrier. His grasp on human language,
like his ability to comprehend human patterns of thought, drained out of him
with increasing rapidity. After a moment, however, he seemed to find a way to
reach back to his former self; his former mind.

“That
is,” he repeated awkwardly, “consistent with what I know of Captain Thermopyle.
He would sacrifice his companions and even his ship to survive.” The idea may
have pained him. “We must act on the assumption that
Trumpet
is alive.”

More
strongly he continued, “
Calm Horizons
has taken her position to guard
against
Trumpet’s
egress from the swarm. It is probable that she will be
able to destroy the gap scout. However, she is heavily engaged by a UMCP
warship.” Again he paused to grope for translation. “You would call the vessel
a ‘Scalpel-class cruiser’. At present the warship’s cannon cannot penetrate
Calm
Horizons’
defences. Yet the warship’s presence diminishes the likelihood
that
Calm Horizons
will be able to ensure
Trumpet’s
destruction.

“We are
instructed to advance to the edge of the swarm so that we may watch for the gap
scout — and also so that we may assist
Calm Horizons
. I have the
co-ordinates we must attain.

“The
cost of
Trumpet’s
survival is too high to be met. She must be destroyed.”

Yes.
Sorus could hardly contain herself.
Yes!

Thank
God Taverner wasn’t looking at her. If he’d glanced up then, he would almost
certainly have seen the quick flare of glee and fury in her eyes, the sudden,
killing hope on her face.

Everything
she asked had been given to her.

Simply
to preserve appearances, mask her joy, she rasped back, “This is your fault. I
hope you remember that. If you hadn’t stopped me from killing her when we had
the chance, you would be on your way home by now.”

Now at
last Taverner raised his gaze to hers. His alien eyes never blinked. “
Calm
Horizons
is aware of the decisions which have been made, and of their
outcome.”

“In
that case” — she turned away because she didn’t trust herself to conceal how
she felt — “we’d better get going.

“Helm,
this Amnioni will give you the co-ordinates. Getting there won’t be easy, but
you can do it. If you engage a little rotation, you’ll have enough manoeuvring
thrust to point us in the right direction.”

“Right,
Captain.” Helm spent a few seconds keying commands. Then he gestured Taverner
to his board so that the Amnioni could enter the co-ordinates.

Taverner
didn’t delay. Apparently he saw no reason to thwart Sorus now. Releasing his
grip on her console, he let himself drift in the direction of the helm station.

While
his back was turned, Sorus met scan’s look. Just for a moment the two women
grinned at each other like idiots.

DAVIES

H
e came out of the darkness of anoxia and acceleration wondering why
he was still alive.

Stupid.
He was forever wondering why he was still alive. What was the matter with him?
Didn’t he ever learn? Wondering changed nothing; helped nothing. Only the fact
mattered.

G had
let go of him, and every bone and sinew in his body hurt, but he endured among the
living.

No, g
hadn’t let go. He still weighed more than he should have. His pulse seemed to
cut and scrape in his veins, as though his blood were clotted with broken
glass. Mortality held him in his g-seat, leaning down pitilessly on all his
pains. Someone had driven spikes through the cast into his arm; into his ribs.
He wasn’t sure that he could lift his head, or swallow. He was doing his best
when he opened his eyes.

At
first what he saw didn’t make sense.

Through
a migraine of phosphenes and dehydration, he recognised the bridge. That
remained constant, at any rate. And the decompression klaxons were silent. He
could breathe, as long as he didn’t try to inhale deeply. To that extent, at
least,
Trumpet
remained intact.

But the
scan display in front of him seemed to indicate that she wasn’t moving. Thrust
said she was: the muted hull-roar of the drive said she was: g said she was.
Scan said she wasn’t.

The
screens were big enough to see, but his eyes refused to focus on anything
smaller: his board’s indicators; the messages on his readouts. Simply lowering
his head to get a better look at them hurt too much. He had no idea what was
going on.

Respiration
whispered around him, as if the air-scrubbers were gasping softly. That didn’t
make sense either. He’d never heard scrubbers produce such a sound. When pads
were clogged, they sometimes emitted a low, aggrieved sigh, like an asthmatic
moan. But never this choked clutch for breath.

He had
to move his head;
had
to.

The
pain of tipping his head forward brought tears to his eyes. That helped: when
he’d blinked the dampness away, he was able to see more clearly.

His
readouts answered his first question.
Trumpet
was running on automatic,
and her failsafes had overridden helm. Too much rock in the way: Morn’s pre-set
instructions would have killed the ship. In self-defence the automatic systems
held
Trumpet
stationary in the swarm, shifting her from side to side
only when an asteroid threatened collision.

But she
was still in reach of the black hole. Its hunger called to her constantly,
urging her backward. She couldn’t refuse unless she used thrust to counter the
commanding tug of the gravity well. Fortunately her failsafes provided for
that.

Thank
God Morn had thought to activate them before she lost consciousness.

Where
was the gap scout? Where in relation to
Soar
and the other ship? — to
the singularity and the swarm? Davies hunted scan for information.

No sign
of
Soar
; of any ships at all: that was good. And the black hole was
precisely
there
. But — He gaped, and his heart stung, as he realised
that
Trumpet
had covered less than five k since he’d blacked out. No
wonder the black hole still gripped her.

Trumpet
was a sitting target.

Scan
insisted that there were no other ships within range of its instruments. But there
would
be, Davies thought — slowly, painfully, his mind obstructed by the
wrong neurotransmitters — if the gap scout didn’t move soon.

Or
maybe he didn’t need to worry about other ships. Maybe the black hole’s event
horizon was the only real danger. As the singularity fed, it grew. It was a
small thing as such phenomena were measured. Before long it wouldn’t be. Given
enough time, it would grow large enough to devour the entire swarm.

Long
before that, it would become too strong for
Trumpet
to resist.

At
least now he knew why stones streamed constantly past the gap scout. They were
diving into a ravenous maw of g.

But why
couldn’t scan tell him where she was?

Of
course. Slow, he was too
slow.
His brain wasn’t working worth shit.
Of
course
scan couldn’t identify the ship’s position — except in relation to
the black hole. There were no referents. Every identifiable object in the area
had already been sucked down. And the surrounding swarm was still far too thick
to permit any conceivable access to the starfield. This deep in the torrent of
asteroids, even Greater and Lesser Massif-5 didn’t register on the instruments.

Well,
fine. In that case Davies would simply have to assume that
Trumpet’s
present orientation bore some resemblance to the heading Morn had chosen before
she lost consciousness. The ship needed to go straight forward. He hadn’t
studied her helm. In fact, those functions hadn’t been routed to his board. But
his training in the Academy would enable him to cope. Somehow he could make
Trumpet
go where he pointed her. All he had to do was unclip his belts, carry his mass
across the deck to the command station, secure himself there. When he was
safely settled, he could figure out how to increase thrust until
Trumpet
finally pulled herself out of this gravity well.

But
first he needed rest. Right now the effort of getting out of his g-seat was
beyond him.

The
sounds of battered, limping respiration continued, as if two or three people
were dying on the bridge behind him; breathing their last — It didn’t make
sense. Scrubbers couldn’t produce that kind of noise. If
Trumpet
were
losing atmosphere in distant gasps, the decompression klaxons would have warned
him.

He was
altogether too slow. His thoughts seemed to struggle and stagger under their
own weight: his head might have been full of cat. Something he’d forgotten —
Had Morn finally gone to sickbay, drugged herself to protect the ship from her
gap-sickness? And was he really her, cloyed with her drugs as well as her
memories, stricken by her illness?